Friday, 28 February 2014

The truth,

When it finds you,

Cuts like a hot hot knife.

Slashing faith,

Severing ties,

Stabbing through your heart.

Spurting a red river of lies.

Who has the will

The strength

To staunch it?

Season Two! It’s amazing to be back!

Back with the team at Hannibal -- that great roiling stew of wild imaginations and
incredible talents cooking together until, unbidden, the unspeakable images of
horrible beauty start to bubble and break surface in our collective minds. And back with you fabulous Fannibals -- smart, artistic, enthusiastic and wonderfully sardonically funny. We have got a lot of shocking surprises for you in Season Two. But really, I can't wait to see what YOU have in store for US.

Kaiseki begins...

The opening episode is called
Kaiseki. I am hotly anticipating the food scenes because Kaiseki is the highest
form of Japanese cuisine – which, even at its lowest form is more refined,
symbolic and artful than any other. Based on a deep and ancient philosophy of
nature and seasons, it is a dozen-plus course meal of small plates that are meticulously
prepared and served in formal, codified order on antique dishes of subtle
beauty. At about $350 per person.

All summer, I had been
anticipating the food scenes because back in July, Bryan had asked for thoughts
on Kaiseki and asked if any part of human flesh looks like sliced flounder. I
responded that there are several formulae for bleaching flesh developed mainly
for the poultry industry because consumers prefer breast meat to thigh. (A bit
of hydrogen pyroxide is all it takes to bleach those low-rent thighs so they
look just like breast meat!)

Having a vegetarian for dinner?

We tossed around ideas of what vegetarian food Hannibal could serve Dr Chilton who has lost (how careless) a kidney and is on a restricted diet. I suggest a marrow squash soup where the middle has been scooped out to look like bone marrow. See what I did there? Well nobody else did and this sketch goes into the shredder.

my first stab at Chilton's vegetarian dinner

At last, the first script of the
second season is circulated. I tear into it the moment it arrives. Devouring
it. Drinking in its images: orange-fleshed sea urchins and thinly sliced sashimi balancing
on a fishbone. Ash-baked celery root smoldering in a coffin of salt. Dining on
nightmares. Will. Wendigo. Wonderful.

Back to designing the food for the screen - making it cinematic, as Bryan says. I circulate
sketches and get no response – this is not a bad thing – everybody is madly
working on the next urgent thing, so no news is good news. I call up Hashimoto, a Kaiseki master
and go over everything with his son Mark. They generously offer to come to the
shoot to make sure we don’t commit any crass transgressions of the
multitudinousness of ancient Kaiseki correctness.

my sketch after reading the script

Pre-production will start in early
September. Small problem: I’ll be at a conference in Buenos Aries. Big
solution: coffee shops and hotel lobbies. I’m still in awe of how easy it is to
get things done using other people’s WiFi.

Well, easy-ish…

We need live sea urchins so Mads
can lift the orange flesh out of the shell when he’s making dinner for
Laurence. Two searches, a phonecall, and a sinking feeling inform me that sea
urchin is not in season. A week after the shoot, markets will be awash in sea
urchins but when we shoot, there will be none commercially available. And they
need to be alive because as soon as they die, all the spines drop off and what
you have is the shellfish version of a Chinese Crested Hairless dog. Just that
ugly.

West Coast fishmen to the rescue!

Over the phone, a nice person at
the Sea Urchin Harvesters Association tells me about a tiny west-coast fishing
town, Steveston where independent sea urchin divers with small boats are
allowed to sell off-season to people at the wharf. By sheer happenstance, I have a niece, Melissa, who is visiting her
in-laws in that very town. She agrees to go to the wharf and finds a diver who
will get the sea urchins. We are on first base!

I will not bore you here with
further whining about how hard it is to ship sea creatures on a long weekend
(Yes, it is a long weekend as shooting starts on Season 2). Even if you have a
nephew who works for AirCargo it will take three days. Sea urchins die in two and their spines
start falling out from stress as soon as they hear they are flying Air Canada.

I decide that we need to mercy-kill
the sea urchins when they are fresh and healthy then cure them in a way that
keeps the spines on. Google says this is not possible but that’s not the answer
I want, so I call my taxidermist at ProLine for advice. He is a true artist who
happens to work in dead animals and he says No problem. Just bury them in salt.

sea urchins with heavy make-up

Melissa does the dirty work,
haggling with the divers for the best urchins then killing, cleaning, and
burying them in salt. Twenty pounds of it. We are on second!

But the wretched urchins won’t dry
out completely in her humid coastal town. Plus they are no longer bright red.
They’ve gone sad brown. So, emailing from Buenos Aries, I ask her to FedEx them
immediately to my assistant Ettie in hotter, drier Toronto. She has agreed to
finish off the drying process, glue the dropped spines back on and spray paint
them glossy red. Two days later I get an email from Ettie that the urchins have
arrived – spines intact! And quite dry. We store them with charcoal to
eliminate the sea smell.

We
are rounding third, but for a home run, we need large fresh uni from the sushi
supplier to place into the dried, painted shells. The (English-speaking) sushi
supplier cannot get the big ones he had promised so I have to go to another
(English-challenged). Which is alright since I have to switch hamachi suppliers
too.

Hamachi? Problems there? Yes, this
is to be expected – but hardly the fun-fest of getting the sea urchins. Just
business as usual.

Kaiseki dinner complete. Now think about Will's nightmare when Wendigo watches over dinner and Will coughs up a few memories.

While we buzz around setting up the table, the camera crew shoots
the sea urchin scene. The sea urchins look alive, Hashimoto trims the
yellowtail and shows Mads how to
slice like a sushi master.

Kaiseki master Hashimoto with Martha deLaurentiis and me on set

Laurence loves yellowtail sashimi and so does Mads
-- their chopsticks flying through the retakes. We go through every last bit of
hamachi –I had bought a few hundred dollars worth and it was just enough.

Francisco and I are still piling
food flowers horns bones and bugs onto the hallucidinner table when the crew
moves to the next food scene: Hannibal serving Chilton a Salt-baked Celeriac.
It’s a dish made famous at Brett Graham’s Michelin-starred restaurant, The
Ledbury. His celery root is baked in a shell of browned salt and flour dough but I decide to go with
a shell of pure white salt rubbed with ashed celery leaves. I want it to look like a baby Wendigo hatching from
an icy snowball from hell.

Up next...Hallucidinner. Did that tentacle just smell me?

I'm down to my last few celeriac
slices when the AD calls “moving on”. Which means we are finished that scene
and are moving on to the Hallucidinner. The AD calls "Final touches" and we all rush in to make sure everything looks great. Glycerine is applied to meat to make it look juicy...water is sprayed on leaves and flowers for a dewy look...Fabreez is spritzed on the octopus to keep it smelling like a rose - after all, it has a "bit" in this scene.

the endless feast of Will's hallucination

We rush around doing Final Touches while at the head of the table, Wendiguy looks more bored than ominous.

Wendigo gets a horn adjustment before his big dinner scene

More on roasting things in encased in salt

An addendum to Chapter Celeriac.
Compared to faking live sea urchin, making the salt-baked celeriac in ash had
been a piece of cake -- well, 36 cakes because of the length of the scene we
needed three dozen celeriac roots. Especially easy for me because Ettie and
John (my new apprentice and mixologist - every serious kitchen has someone in charge of cocktails) had gone ahead and baked all of them
while I was away, snoring in a Buenos Aires meeting hall.

Salt-baking was used in traditional Chinese Hakka
cuisine, you wrap your chicken in lotus leaf and bury it salt in a large heavy
pot. Then you put it on the fire on low and go out to a Jackie Chan movie. When
you get home, you take the pot off, throw out the salt, unwrap you steaming
tender chicken and dive in with both chopsticks. This is a centuries-old
country dish that previously was eaten only by wealthy salt merchants when salt
was the sel in salary. Slow-baking in salt is something I usually consider a
waste of salt. A travesty. Between the desiccating sea urchin and baking
celeriac, I went through about 50 lbs of the stuff.

A salt-bake treat to impress your vege-pescatarian friends

Lately, smarty-pants chefs from
Copenhagen to Frederick to Sydney have been putting salt-baked root vegetables on their menus. You can salt-baking
everything from fish to chicken to beets and pears, but I think it works best
with people meats. So if you want to try salt-baking, here’s an easy recipe for fish
to try:

2. In a medium sized mixing bowl, whisk egg white til frothy
with a fork. Add water and whisk til combined. Add salt all at once and fennel
seeds. Mix thoroughly til all the salt is damp and clingy -- like sand when you are making a sand
castle. To test consistency, take a couple tablespoonsful in your palm and make
a fist, crushing salt together. When you open your hand, salt should hold together
in a ball. If not, froth another egg white with water and add a bit at a time
to the salt mixture until it holds together. Don’t add too much or it will be a
struggle to crack the salt shell once it’s baked. Set aside.

3. Line a baking sheet with a sheet of baking parchment and
place about ½ cup of salt mixture in the middle. Spread out to the approximate
length and width of your fish. Tamp down to a thickness of about ½ inch. Rub
fish with olive oil and place on top of the salt. Stuff cavity with lemon
slices and herbs. Spoon the rest of the salt mixture on top and sides, pressing
over the fish so the fish is completely encased in a ½-inch layer of salt.

4. Roast for 20 - 25 minutes. Remove from oven and rest for
5 minutes. To serve, transfer to a wooden cutting board and serve.

5. To serve: At the table, crack the salt shell by tapping
with a mallet then carefully remove the salt shards, brushing salt bits away
from the fish or they will make the fish too salty. Pull away the top layer of
skin, using a sharp thin knife to detach the skin from the gill, fins, and tail.
Using a wide fork, lift the meat off the bones and serve onto individual
plates. When the top side has been served, remove the bone by lifting the head
up and away toward the tail. All the small bones will come away with the spine.
Remove the fin bones and serve the bottom half of the fish meat, leaving the
skin on the salt crust. Have a martini. You’ve earned it.And if you're still interested in laughing at my life, an interview with Deadshirtand one with MSN Entertainment

Next week...

You really have got to see Mad's special way with Osso Buco. I"m not kidding. You have got to watch next week.